1. Field of Invention
The invention relates to an assay device processing instrument, for example for processing assay devices in the form of chips on which have been deposited an array of localised reactive sites containing different reactive species, for example different antibodies.
2. Description of Related Art
In this context, “assay” means the quantitative analysis of a substance to determine the proportion of some valuable or potent constituent e.g. the active constituent in a pharmaceutical.
An immunoassay is a technique which measures the presence of a substance (analyte) in a biological sample exploiting an immunological reaction between antibody and antigen.
In the fields of chemical/veterinary diagnosis or drug screening, it is necessary to analyse samples to determine the presence of certain analytes. Recently, it has been proposed to provide a set of different antibodies on respective reactive sites on a substrate such as a chip. The sample is deposited on the chip and following incubation and other processes, a chemiluminescence process is monitored to detect the presence or absence of the appropriate analyte at each site. This is described in more detail in EP-A-0902394.
The problem with analysis of such chips is that the processes are complex and require careful handling of the chips and thus significant manual intervention.
WO-A-93/23732 describes automatic staining apparatus for slide specimens but this is a histochemical process and has no relevance to assays.